Plans to build conversational agents always seem to ignore Moravec’s paradox. The hard bit of building such an agent is in building a tolerably human-like conve

Plans to build conversational agents always seem to ignore Moravec’s paradox. The hard bit of building such an agent is in building a tolerably human-like conversational partner, not in searching and sorting data. It’s like the “AI” projects that spend all their time building a fancy sci-fi-looking robot body, ignoring the fact that how much of a “person” a robot seems has almost nothing to do with how physically anthropomorphic it is. Johnny 5 and Wall-e are proof enough that the mind, not the geometry of the body, is what’s important.